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Bitcoin transactions take negligible amounts of electricity to produce and validate. The fact that you can spin up a Bitcoin node on a Raspberry Pi is trivial
by jude- 6y ago
Bitcoin transactions take negligible amounts of electricity to produce and validate. The fact that you can spin up a Bitcoin node on a Raspberry Pi is trivial proof of this.
Block production, on the other hand, takes as much energy as the market will bear.
- minsc__and__boo 6y agoBitcoin transactions are worthless unless put into blocks, and blocks have a cap for transactions.
- jude- 6y agoThe parent was talking about the cost per transaction being high. In reality, that number is basically 0. The entire cost of Bitcoin mining is in block production, no matter how many or few transactions there are. If you're going to get mad about the energy use, at least direct it towards the right target.
- kaba0 6y agoAs others have written, a block can handle at most (I think 100, but the exact number doesn’t matter) transactions, so to get an lower bound on consumption per transaction we could divide the block’s energy requirements by this number.
- jude- 6y agoIf there were _zero_ transactions, Bitcoin would take the same amount of energy. The proof-of-work calculation is _completely decoupled_ from how many transactions there are.
- minsc__and__boo 6y agoYou're missing the point. The point isn't that there are zero transactions, it's that there is an upper limit to the transactions allowed on blocks (a very famous limit) which allows for these types cost calculations.
- jude- 6y agoOP was arguing that transactions in Bitcoin take a lot of energy. I'm pointing out that this simply isn't true -- all the energy use in Bitcoin is in solving the PoW puzzle, which is unrelated to transactions. It's not like this is a secret -- read Bitcoin's source code if you don't believe me.
- minsc__and__boo 6y agoNobody is saying that PoW doesn't exist, so no, I'm not going to read Bitcoin's source code. That is such an odd thing to say. You can calculate cost per transaction because each block has a maximum number of transactions, irregardless of the current PoW difficulty. I don't know why you're so fixated on this. You can take 10 minutes of electricity costs and project it onto the number of transactions in the last block.
- jude- 6y agoIt's now an odd thing to recommend reading the source code to a skeptic on a tech site that focuses on software development? You've come to the wrong place if you believe that reading the comments section will be more informative than studying the software artifact being discussed. You and the OP commit a category error in thinking that transactions contribute to Bitcoin's energy expenditure. Transactions are no more a source of Bitcoin's energy usage than solar panels are a source of the Sun's energy usage. The sun produces energy on a schedule that is independent of the number of solar panels around to collect it. Similarly, Bitcoin consumes energy on a schedule that is independent of the number of transactions around to be mined.
- kaba0 6y agoIt’s like arguing that the heating in a car is energetically free because when the motor is on, it will generate heat. Just because PoW have to happen regardless of transactions doesn’t make transactions decoupled from it - and thus they have a ‘price’.